Re: Question concerning Chatterjee/Dino-Books/Peter Wellnhofer

[Dinogeorge@aol.com]

In a message dated 96-01-21 20:24:52 EST, klausman@rz.uni-sb.de (Klaus
Richter) writes:

>The first's concerning Sankar Chatterjee and one of his finds. In "Dinosaurs
>Rediscovered", Lessem writes that Ch. came Oct. 1990 to the 50th
>anniversary meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology with a
>puzzling fossil he'd found in the 225-million-year-old red clay of
>West Texas. it was a nearly complete skull with a bladelike beak,
>entirely toothless without any resemblance to the dominant reptiles of
>its day. It resembled a birds skull and lead some paleontologists and
>Ch., that this skull belonged to one of the first ostrich-mimic dinosaurs
>(like Ornithomimus or Gallimimus of late creataceous) - another
>puzzling fossil found by Ch. after his _Protoavis_ discovery.
>Did anyone here heard about that skull and results of research ?
>Was it a fake or was it a skull of an early ostrich-mimic dinosaur or
>some kind of convergence ?

This skull became the type specimen of the species _Shuvosaurus
inexpectatus_, which Sankar asserts was a Triassic ornithomimid.
Unfortunately, most workers do not accept this identification, because he did
not compare the skull with those of another toothless archosaur,
_Lotosaurus_. There are similarities between _Shuvosaurus_ and ornithomimids,
but there are also similarities between _Shuvosaurus_ and _Lotosaurus_.
Furthermore, other peculiar postcranial bones from the same strata--no skull
material, unfortunately--are of a size compatible with the _Shuvosaurus_
skull and may belong to the same taxon, and they do not resemble ornithomimid
postcrania. They are presently referred to the archosaurian genus
_Chatterjeea_.

>Second Questions, concerning good dinosaur books:
>Does anyone knows where to get good dinosaur books (Horner, Bakker, Lessem
>et al.) in Europe, especially in Germany ?

I have one paperback by Hartmut Haubold titled _Die Dinosaurier_, published
by Die Neue Brehm-Buecherei, which is excellent and covers all the dinosaurs
through 1989. I also have a terrific hardcover by Ernst Probst and Raymund
Windolf titled _Dinosaurier in Deutschland_, published by C.Bertlesmann in
1993, which exhaustively covers all dinosaurs known from Germany. They'll get
you started.

>What you can buy in regular german bookstores is almost ridiculuous (in
>on store I've found the book of L.B.Halstead about Dinosaurs, with lot
>of outdated information - dinosaurs as cold-blooded, stupid animals).